Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol. 3

To Be or Not To Be

A MORAL problem, un cas de conscience (a case of conscience), as they say in French. To defend yourself against your attacker and kill him who comes to kill you or stand disarmed and let yourself be killed-which is better, which has the greater moral value? To fight your enemy is normal, is human. To preserve yourself, that is to say, your body, is the very first injunction of Nature. That is Nature's primary and funda­mental demand. And to preserve one's life one has to take others' life. That is also Nature. But then, it is said, man is meant to rise above Nature, live (even if it means to die) according to a higher law – not the biological law, the law of tooth and claw. The higher law is for the preservation of life indeed, but others' life, not one's own, if it comes to that; it is not self-centred, but wholly other-regarding, it is for harmony, for peace and amity, not violence and battle. If one demurs and points out that it requires two to be friends and at peace, the answer is that one side must begin, and the merit goes to him who begins. One need not worry about the other side, which may be left to follow its own law of life, which, however, can be gained over only in this way and not by compulsion or coercion or violence. Na hi vairena vairani samyantiha kadacana. Never by enmity is enmity appeased, says the Dhammapada.¹

This is a way of cutting the Gordian knot. But the problem is not so simple as the moralist would have it. Resist not evil: if it is made an absolute rule, would not the whole world be filled with evil? Evil grows much faster than good. By not resisting evil one risks to perpetuate the very thing that one fears; it deprives the good of its chance to approach or get a

¹Canto I 5

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foothold. That is why the Divine Teacher declares in the Gita that God comes down upon earth, assuming a human body,¹to protect the good and slay the wicked,² slay not metaphori­cally but actually and materially, as he did on the field of the Kurus.

It is a complex problem and the solution too is complex. The Gita – Hinduism generally – does not posit a univer­sal dharma, but a hierarchy of dharmas. Men have different natures; so their duties, their functions and activities, their paths of growth and development must naturally be different. A rigid rule does not fit in with the facts of life, and the more absolute it is, the less efficacy it possesses as a living reality. Therefore in the Indian social scheme, there is one dharma for the Brahmin and another for the Kshatriya, a third for the Vaishya and a fourth for the Shudra.

The Brahmin is he who represents in his nature and charac­ter the principle and movement of knowledge, of compre­hension and inclusion, of peace and harmony – all the qualities that are termed sattwic. A Brahmin does not fight, the very build of his consciousness prevents him from wounding and hurting; he has no enemy; even if he is attacked or killed, he does not raise his arm to protect himself (although Rama­krishna would prescribe even for him a modified or mollified mode of resisting the evil, hissing at least if not biting). The Biblical injunction, we know, is to present the other cheek too to the smiter. This is for those who follow the Brahminical discipline. But a Kshatriya, who in his nature and cons­ciousness is a warrior, has another dharma; he is the armed guard of knowledge and truth, he is strength and force. He has to resist the evil in the name of the Lord, he has to raise his arm to strike. He is the instrument of Rudra and Mahakali. Does not the mighty goddess declare - I draw the bow for Rudra, I hurl the arrow to slay the hater of the truth"?³ If the Kshatriya does not follow his own dharma, but seeks to imitate the Brahmin, he brings about a confusion liable to disintegrate the society, he is then un-Aryan, inglorious, unworthy of heaven, deserving all the epithets which Sri Krishna heaped upon the dejected,

¹ Manusim tanu asritam, IX. 11

² ParitraNaya sadhunam vinasaya ca duskrtam, IV. 8

³ Aha rudraya dhanurakanomi brahmadiswe saprobes kantaba u

-Rig Veda, IX. 126

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depressed and confused Arjuna. So long as the world is held by brute force, so long as there is the sway of evil power over the material earth and the physical body, there will be the need to resist it physically: if I do not do it, other instruments will be found. I may say like Arjuna, overwhelmed with pity and grief, "I shall not fight", but God and the cosmic deities may refuse my refusal and compel me to do what in my ignorance and wrong ­headedness I would not like to do.

Here lies the secret and the solution of the problem. It is, indeed, the solution given for all ages by the Gita. There will always be a problem, a difficult decision to make – a division in the consciousness – so long as one is in the realm of dualities, in one's mental being and consciousness, ruled by relativities and contingencies. There one cannot but have a divided loyalty. A part of you, for example, is loyal to your family, another to your country, a third to yourself or to some ideal which you have set up. And naturally man feels confused in the midst of their conflicting claims and is at a loss to choose. Therefore, the Gita says, the highest law, the supreme code of conduct, is the Divine Will. And the only work and labour for man is to discover and identify oneself with this Divine Will. "Abandon all other standards of conduct, take refuge in Me alone."¹ That is the supreme secret of human life – as well as of the Life Divine.

To know the Divine Will and to be one with it is not easy, to be sure. But that is the only radical solution. That has got to be done, if one is to come out of the chaos he is in.

Once in this status of the divine consciousness, one passes beyond the three Gunas. That is to say, one bids good-bye to one's (the human sense of) freedom and option or choice. One can say no longer, I cannot do it, for it seems immoral, I have to do that, because that seems good. One goes beyond good and bad and awaits the divine command. One does what one is ordered to do from above, what is needed to fulfil the Cosmic Purpose. You do not act then, it is the Divine who acts in you.

It may be asked if even then there are not some types of activity and impulsion that are intrinsically evil, undivine –­

¹ The Gita, XVIII.66

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they can under no circumstances be godly or God's instruments, they have to be rejected, cast aside in the very begin­ning, also in the middle and naturally in the end. But it must be remembered that the human mind cannot be the judge of what is divine or undivine, there are things the Divine may sanction which the mental being fights shy of. It must leave into the Divine to choose His instrument and His mode of activity – it is sufficient if the mental being knows by whom it is impelled and. where it fallsas an arrow shot to its mark:kenesitampatatipresitam.¹

Yes, there is one thing intrinsically evil and undivine and that has to be rejected and cast aside ruthlessly – that is nothing else than the egoistic consciousness. It is this that has passions and prejudices, likes and dislikes, ideas and ideals, formations of its own, other deities installed in place of the Divine Truth and Reality. The ego goes, indeed, and with it also those rhythms and stresses, lines and shades germaneto it that bar the free flow of the Supreme Breath. But the in­strument remains and the arms and the weapons-they are cleansed and sanctified: instead of the Asura wielding them, it is now the gods, the Divine Himself who possess and use them.

¹Kena Upanishad,I.1

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